Gender in Pop Culture

            After a brief scroll through the ‘News’ app on my iPhone, I found an interesting article that immediately caught my attention. It’s titled “Rejoice: Image Searches Just Became More Gender-Balanced” and written by Semcon and published by Chicagoist on December 2, 2016.

            Basically this article is about a new “open source software” called “Re-Search” made by Swedish company, Semcon. What this new search engine does is gender balances searched internet images. For example, if you were to go on Google and search “engineer” you would get thousands of images of a man in a hard hat holding blue prints, looking very intrigued at his work. This gender unbalance goes the other way too, for example, if you sear “teacher” you would get mostly of images of a woman in front of a blackboard. This of course, isn’t fair, and Semcon is working to fix the problem.

            What I think is very interesting is that I’m sure most of us, including myself, never though that this was even an issue. We all probably just searched things on Google Images and never batted an eye as to the gender gap there was, even though we would hear about it all the time in the news. It was just one of those things that went right over our heads. But now that I am aware of it, it does make a me a bit angry. When I was younger, there was some road construction going on by my house, and the team working on the road was all women. There had been a sign put up that said “Men At Work”. The first day they were there, my mom and I drove by and saw one of the crew members duct taping “Women At Work” on to the sign. That’s something that’s stuck with me for a long time, and a small event in my life that I really looked up to ever since that day. So when I found this article about this gender imbalance on the internet, that I had never thought about, I was very excited, even if I wasn’t worried about it before. I especially liked the part of the article that included the ‘flip side’ to this problem as well.

            I think it’s a wonderful opportunity, Semcon is doing more than what they need to by closing the gender gap. Something as simple as this, can cause a big impact. Just image a 10-year-old using Google images to research a career project for school, and all they find is pictures of men in that field. This way, children can be taught too, at a young age, that you truly can be anything you want to be.

Works Cited Page

Semcon. “Rejoice: Image Searches Just Became More Gender-Balanced”. Chicagoist. 2 December, 2016. Accessed 6 December, 2016. http://chicagoist.com/2016/12/02/rejoice_image_searches_just_became.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-nFP4PKaW4

Unit 3 Project

          For the Unit 3 project, I chose to analyze the film Me Before You directed by Thea Sharrock, produced by Alison Owen, Karen Rosenfelt, and Sue Baden-Powell. The producing companies are Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and New Line Cinema. It was released May 23, 2016 and earned $18.72 million opening weekend. The film was based on the novel Me Before You written by Jojo Moyes.

The film focuses on a woman named Louisa ‘Lou’ Clark, who is chatty, quirky, and loves her bold fashion. When Lou loses her job at a bakery, she is given to opportunity to help care for Will Traynor, a successful, wealthy, and once-active man, who became paralyzed two years earlier in a car accident.  Will has a negative outlook on life, he believes that he is only merely existing, because he is unable to live the active lifestyle he once had. Slowly but surely, Lou’s cheery attitude persuades Will to go out to different events with her. The more time that Lou and Will spend together, the more they get to know about each other. Lou, how she once was going to go off to college, but her family fell on hard times and needed her support. Will, how he once pretty much had it all, a gorgeous girlfriend, active and thrilling lifestyle, countless friends, and lost it all to the accident. But Will has more secrets that Lou eventually finds out about. Will and his parents had made a deal, after Will tried to end his own life, that if he still wanted to go in six months’ time, they would go to Switzerland as a family and Will would be medically induced. Of course his parents were very much against that, but had to honor his wishes and the deal they made. As a counter-move to get Will to change his mind, his mother hired Lou hoping that she would bring light into Will’s life. Will and Lou do fall in love, through their romantic trips to the horse races, and the symphony, and even his ex-girlfriend’s wedding. But on their final trip, a tropical paradise island, Will finally tells Lou what she knew all along. Will explains that even though he does love Lou, he still won’t be able to live life the way he would want to, and how he believes that’s not a life worth living. Through a lot of soul searching, and a talk with her dad, Lou decides to go with Will and his family to Switzerland to see him go. The film ends with Lou sitting in a cute café in Paris, reading a letter from Will explaining how he set up a bank account for her to use for school so she can finally stop taking care of everyone else and do something for her.  

From a feminist standpoint, I would have to say that this film does reinforces patriarchal views and stereotypes. The film reinforces it in the way that Will is a handsome, athletic, rich, white male. Where Lou is more average, quirky, and smart. Will is clearly superior to Lou. If it had not been for Will’s accident, these two surely would have never met. Of course after the accident, Will is still handsome and rich, but he isn’t able to live the life he once had so he has to almost “settle” for Lou’s company.  It also reinforces the idea that men in general are superior to women.

There are also many, typical romance elements to this story. Lou is the poor, kind of an outcast girl, from a poor family, and no real future. Will is the handsome prince that comes to save her from her life. He saves her by 1. Employing her to help out her family and 2. By then giving her the bank account so she can go to college. This implies once again that Will is better than Lou, and almost says that she couldn’t have gone off to college without Will’s help. There aren’t really any evil queens or ugly stepsisters in the film, except maybe Will’s ex-girlfriend who breaks up with him after his accident. And that’s where the tables turn in the “who saves who” debate. Lou teaches Will what true love is like. She loves him after his disability, so not just for his looks or for his money, but for who he really is as a person. So one could argue that Lou also in turn saved Will.

Overall, I did really enjoy the film and I liked the story line, except the part of Will dying in the end. Once going more in-depth though, I could see the flaws in it, from a feminist standpoint. All in all, it’s a great movie and can teach someone a lot about love, life, and that we really need to enjoy the time we have, because everything can change in an instant.